by Gwen Moffat
‘Evans,’ he said, ‘was killed because he saw Judson’s shot gun on the Saturday afternoon, after Judson left, ostensibly for Liverpool. Of course, Evans thought nothing of it at the time but on the Monday evening he discovered it was gone. Evidently he’d decided he’d prefer to be armed when he went up to Lloyd’s cottage and, guessing Gladys wouldn’t give him permission to take the gun, he thought he’d sneak it out of the house. But it wasn’t there—and then he remembered seeing it on the Saturday. So he went back and told Gladys.’
‘Did he try to blackmail her?’ Miss Pink asked.
‘She doesn’t say so. Remember, Judson’s body hadn’t been found then; no one—except Gladys—knew that he was dead. So they sat down and discussed the missing gun.’
His listeners tried to imagine the scene, their faces reflecting their difficulty. Then Miss Pink said: ‘Poor Evans.’
Pryce continued: ‘Gladys told him that the gun must have been stolen by Lloyd or Seale. She told him to go across to his cottage and get some warm clothing and a torch but not to say a word to Ellen about the gun. She said that if Ellen knew it was missing she’d get hysterical and ruin their plans for the night. You know, Gladys may be mad now but she was fiendishly sane then. You see the idea? She’d already decided to kill Evans. He was to tell Ellen he was going to Lloyd’s place and that would make Lloyd the prime suspect if we saw through the attempt to rig Evans’s death as suicide. Her mind worked like a computer. But Ellen mustn’t know about Judson’s missing gun because that gave Gladys a motive for Judson’s death; she’d solved these problems in half an hour or so!
‘After Evans left Parc for his own cottage, she got a piece of rope and a pick-axe handle—yes, you may well look surprised, but that’s what she tells us, calm as you please—and she tied the rope round her waist under her coat and followed Evans to his cottage and listened from the stairs to what he was telling Ellen. He was talking about Lloyd and Ellen said: “But he’s got a gun!” so Gladys knew he hadn’t mentioned Judson’s gun. He hadn’t had time; if he had, they’d still have been talking about it by the time Gladys reached the cottage.
‘She waited for him in his garden and said she’d decided after all they’d go down to Seale’s tent to see if there might be some trace of Judson there. She’d persuaded him that Seale and Lloyd had a hand in Judson’s disappearance, you see.’
‘What about the pick-axe handle?’ Ted asked. ‘She couldn’t hide that.’
‘Yes, I asked her. She was surprised. “I needed it for protection,” she said, “there were two murderers loose in the combe and we were unarmed.” I felt as if she’d convinced herself as well as Evans that they really were setting out on a bit of detective work to prove that Seale and Lloyd were murderers or kidnappers. Gave me a queer feeling, I can tell you.’
‘A natural actress,’ Miss Pink said, ‘a dominant personality—and a stupid man who was emotionally retarded. It was an exciting game he’d got himself involved in and he thought he was playing it with someone who was on the same level as him. If he’d had any doubts he would have consoled himself with the thought that there was no harm in it.’
‘No harm,’ Pryce repeated heavily. ‘She stunned him when he stooped to unzip the fly sheet of the tent. She didn’t have far to drag him to the cooker; she was a strong woman.’
‘Too strong,’ Ted put in. ‘If she’d only broken before.… But she’d put up with Judson for years. There was Anna Waring, Lucy perhaps, certainly others; there was always gossip about him. So why did she suddenly go off the rails? If she’d known all these years— Did she know? About the cottage and how it was used?’
‘Oh yes,’ Pryce said. ‘Judson told her that he’d sold it but she came across a bill for a double mattress which Judson left lying around, and they hadn’t bought a new mattress for Parc. She didn’t say anything about it to him but she had her suspicions and she rang the local rating office under an assumed name, pretending to be interested in the cottage as a potential buyer. They gave her the name of the owner. It was still Judson, of course. That was years ago and for years she’d guessed that he took women there. When he said he was off to Liverpool for the weekend she accepted that “Liverpool” meant the cottage. When Anna Waring rang from Chester on Saturday afternoon, that was the end for Gladys; she’d accepted all the others but she couldn’t take Seale.’
His listeners absorbed that in silence but then they started to think about it. Pryce sipped his brandy appreciatively and looked out at the gleaming water.
‘Why not?’ Ted asked. ‘Was it just that Seale was so very different from the other women, or was it that she was the last straw?’
Miss Pink stirred. ‘Something of both probably. Think of the situation she walked into: Judson and his hole-in-corner life, a double life. His long-suffering, humiliated wife. His quarrels with the local people, their knowledge of what he really was, their contempt. And Lloyd raging against him impotently, and the two boys, Bart and Dewi, worshipping Lloyd and loathing Judson. What an example to them: the local magistrate who sat on the Bench handing down judgements when he was flouting the rules himself. And then Seale comes along with an entirely different set of values. All right, you can say that because they’re based on enjoyment, she’s selfish, but where she clashed with the status quo in Dinas was that she isn’t bothered about appearances. And she’s her own woman. Gladys didn’t hate Seale; she revolted against her own terrible life. It was Seale who made her aware of her humiliations, that’s all.’
‘Well, I don’t see that,’ Pryce said. ‘To my mind, Gladys concentrated all her pent-up energy on the one woman her husband went overboard for and who wouldn’t have anything to do with him.’
‘What about Lloyd?’ Ted asked, knowing Pryce would never see what Miss Pink was getting at. ‘Is Seale staying with him?’
‘Is she, hell! Excuse me, ma’am, but there you are: spends a few days with the man and then takes off. Left a forwarding address in London, spent a night there, sold her van, and left for California. That’s where she belongs if you ask me, among the weirdos: drugs, perverts—’
Miss Pink was laughing. Ted smiled.
‘Don’t get me on the raw,’ Pryce grated. ‘Do you know what the statistics for murder are in Los Angeles?’
‘You’re quite right, Mr Pryce, and if you quote figures I wouldn’t dream of questioning them. Did she leave a forwarding address in California?’
‘She didn’t but the London people got it out of the owner of the flat where she spent the night.’ He shook his head in wonder. ‘Disneyland, that’s what it is.’
‘What’s the address?’ Ted asked.
‘I’ve got it here.’ He reached for his wallet and extracted a sheet of paper. ‘ “Sunnyside, Yose—mite, Calif.”. It’ll be one of those hippie communes. She’s gone back where she belongs.’
‘Yes,’ Miss Pink said, beaming at a sudden vision of Seale back where she belonged on the gaunt white walls of the Sierra Nevada.
LAST CHANCE COUNTRY
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 1
The coyote is an animal rather smaller than a wolf and it is a true scavenger, eating virtually anything but favouring flesh. It has a preference for dead meat because that can be obtained without much expenditure of energy—which is why the pioneers who crossed the Great American Desert rolled their wagons over the graves of their dead, trampling and levelling the ground to eliminate traces of burial.
In the twentieth century there are no oxen nor wagon wheels, and r
ubber tyres leave a signature, so a new grave in the desert looks like a new grave until the wind has drifted it with sand when it becomes part of its innocuous surroundings—unless the scavengers get there first.
The old coyote waited until the sound of the receding engine died and then he slipped through the creosote bushes, bristling with tension as his nose filtered the strange assortment of smells: of human sweat, of warm, disturbed sand, cool gravel, iron, and the sweet scent of meat that had just been killed.
He stood by the grave, alert and mute, hearing his old pack calling in the hills but disregarding them. They were too far away to represent even nuisance value. What he feared was a trap. The meat had been brought to his territory and deposited, but there are no gifts in the desert. The coyote nosed round the pile of sand weighted with rocks, torn between the prize within and the danger without, but he heard no footfall, no whisper in the creosote that wasn’t the breeze; he smelled no smell that was untoward. Tentatively, he started to dig.
*
In Los Angeles a large lady in cream silk pyjamas closed her thriller on a tooled leather book mark, removed her bifocals, switched off the light and stretched out in a bed that was too soft and too warm. Lights from the hotel’s court filtered past her curtains and for a moment she was wistful for her hard bed in Cornwall, for darkness when she put out the light, for owls calling in a November frost. Then she chided herself; nothing came free, and an uncomfortable hotel bed was a small price to pay for winter in the desert—and tomorrow, or shortly afterwards, she would see bighorn sheep. Before Melinda Pink, JP, could count her blessings, she was asleep.
This American journey had started with a bout of arthritis during the wet summer, and a legacy from an old aunt. It was Chrissie Clarke, her factotum, who had talked her into taking the trip. Miss Pink must spend the winter in a dry climate: ‘Africa, that’s what you need; go and look at gorillas and things.’
‘It rains in Africa,’ Miss Pink said.
‘Not in the Sahara. Hire a Land-Rover and explore the desert.’
In view of the fact that she couldn’t turn her head to reverse her own car Miss Pink treated that with the contempt it deserved. Chrissie amended it. ‘Surely there are places where it’s dry and warm and you can watch birds comfortably. I mean, civilized places.’
‘Civilized, warm and dry,’ mused Miss Pink. ‘Are you serious?’
‘You should be, when you can’t bend down to lace your boots. What’s the difference between you going to Scotland next spring and going to—well, Australia, now? You’ll never see next spring the way you’re treating that back. I can cope.’
‘You cope better than I do, but it’s summer now in Australia. That’s too hot. It has to be north of the equator, and preferably where they speak English. I’m too old to bother with problems of communication.’
‘Florida.’
‘Package tours and concrete.’
‘California.’
‘Conspicuous consumption. Wait. Yosemite is in California. Yosemite. Snow. But—Arizona? New Mexico?’
She wrote letters: to naturalists and mountaineers, to Seale, the girl she had met in Snowdonia and who knew the American wilderness as Miss Pink knew the cliffs of Land’s End. Seale had replied from Yosemite:
‘Of course you must come to the States. The desert’s so dry you can see 100 miles but there are springs where the birds go in winter. Hire a car and potter through the south country. I’ll call a friend of my father: got a place in the desert, owns a desert, made a wildlife sanctuary of it. Bighorn sheep, eagles, rattlesnakes; right up your street. No hunting, trespassers shot on sight, he lives on a horse. A right nut case. There’s gorgeous country for hiking and it’s accessible only in winter when it’s like Scotland at midsummer. Jack Nielsen’s the man’s name. Start the trip with him and he’ll pass you on to his pals across the South. Sweetwater Ranch, it’s called; you go to a wide place in the road called Molten and turn left. It’s not on any maps. Sorry I can’t meet you. Later? I got a job as a ski instructor in Sun Valley. Get rid of the arthritis and come to Idaho and ski.’
Miss Pink had been in London when that letter came, discussing an American travel book with her agent who had said it wouldn’t make her fortune but might pay her expenses. She had come home in a happy mood, calculating that the interest on the legacy would help pay her income tax, to learn that Mr Nielsen had telephoned and would call again at seven that same evening.
He came through on the dot. She was so astonished that he should have worked out the time difference accurately that she made allowances for the brisk orders transmitted through space. She was to cable the time of her arrival in Los Angeles as soon as she knew her flight. If she arrived at a convenient hour she was then to take a domestic airline to the town of Calcine. If she arrived late she would find a room booked for her at the Ambassador in Los Angeles. At Calcine she should go to Morgan’s Hotel where she would find a room and a car waiting for her. When she was rested she must follow the highway to Molten and take a left. There were no signposts but the road to Sweetwater Ranch took off by the gas station. There was only one, she couldn’t miss it. Did she ride? ‘I have ridden,’ Miss Pink began cautiously. ‘A long time—’ He told her to take care, making her wonder if the last stage of her journey were to be done on horseback, and then she realized the line was dead.
‘You’ve got a right one there,’ Chrissie said darkly as she replaced the receiver. Miss Pink wondered if watching gorillas in Africa might have proved less strenuous.
That had been four weeks ago, a month in which she would have succumbed to mounting logistics but for Chrissie who had organized everything, right up to putting her on the train to London. And there, in her corner seat, back to the engine, with The Times and Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley beside her, she started to relax as Chrissie issued last-minute instructions.
‘… all on the list in your bag,’ she was saying, ‘the hairdresser at 9.30; your agent calls for you at 10.45—he’ll have the jodhpurs—and if those alterations aren’t right now, it’s your last chance; why you couldn’t wear jeans like everyone else I don’t know—’
‘Saddle sores,’ murmured Miss Pink.
‘… he’ll have your luggage with him, provided you get it to him this afternoon before he leaves for home. Now you will take a cab to his office, won’t you? No underground. And a porter. Don’t you go trying to find a trolley and making it out to the taxi rank on your own. You don’t want to end up flat on your back on the platform.’
Miss Pink smiled euphorically and Chrissie stared. ‘You feeling all right?’
‘Thank you.’ She was at her most sincere. ‘You’re indispensable.’
Chrissie glowered. ‘You’ve let go. You stay that way, but for God’s sake, watch the traffic when you cross the street in London. Look both ways. I’m not sure but what I shouldn’t come with you at least till you get your new glasses—’
Miss Pink surfaced tartly. ‘I haven’t got one foot in the grave. And if you think I can’t cross the road without being knocked down how do you think I’m going to cope with rattlesnakes? And vultures.’ Her eyes were bland. ‘They have vultures in the desert; that’s how you find the bodies.’
‘Oh no!’ Chrissie considered her for a moment. ‘You stay in your hotel in Los Angeles; don’t you go walking the streets. Don’t walk at all in American cities. And lock your bedroom door.’
‘And motoring?’
‘Keep the doors locked, at least till you get out into the country. Crime’s in the big cities. Once you get in the deserts you’ll be safe.’
What did Chrissie know about deserts? mused Miss Pink five days later, as her hired car sped past the last mobile home on the outskirts of Calcine towards a range of violet mountains with purple shadows in their gullies. The sun was westering but still hot and she was struggling to find how the air conditioner worked. A strong wind was blowing; when the window was rolled down there was a tornado in the car, opened only a crack, it was
like an oven.
The road aimed straight for the mountains across an immense plain stippled with dark bushes that were spaced with exquisite regularity on the pale ground. There were no flowers, no vivid colours; even the sky looked washed out, yet dazzling. Oily mirages shimmered above the tar.
There were no clouds. Nothing moved outside the car. Before her gaze the desert and the desert ranges stood: implacable, inanimate. It was important to remember that they were inanimate, that on their own they represented no danger. Danger came with the human element, with human mistakes. The desert would be a bad place for a breakdown.
A crab was crossing the road.
Her mind stood on a brink. So far from the coast? A land crab? She slowed down. The creature paid no attention to the car but continued walking: straight, not crab-wise. Could it be a tarantula? It was as if a science fiction film she was watching had expanded to become her environment. She contracted her awareness to near and familiar objects: her green leather bag, the petrol gauge reading three-quarters full, the dull plastic of the fascia that had been assembled in a factory by a man who punched a clock, went home to his family, worried about the mortgage. She was an elderly English spinster on holiday in America where climate and conditions were extreme, producing large flies which in turn produced spiders somewhat bigger than those found in a bath in Cornwall. She wondered what Chrissie would have said on finding a tarantula in the bath.
The road crossed the mauve mountains by way of a pass totally devoid of vegetation or any place to park except the deep sandy verges. Steep slopes of angular blocks, neither scree nor boulder fields, were overhung by crazy spires and arêtes which in close-up were no longer violet, but a baked brown. Beyond and below stretched another desert enclosed by further ranges, and the only sign of life were two specks on the ruler of the road which could have been patches of new tar but which moved slowly towards her. There were no habitations, only the horizontal striations of pale sand and dark bushes.
